Appcelerator Blog

The Leading Resource for All Things Mobile

Tonight, we pushed the latest 1.3 update to distribution servers. You should be getting an update notification inside Titanium Developer if you haven’t already. It’s been a little over 4 weeks since our last release. We had promised to get out 1.3 before the end of May and we’re a little earlier than expected.

The 1.3 release included over 120+ fixes for both Android and iPhone/iPad. The Android team won the most bug fixes in this release clocking in 63 bug fixes to iPhone’s 61. Go Android! For a full list of all the changes, please see the Change Log. Great job to Don, Bill and Marshall for all the hard work on Android. We still have a ways to go to where we want with Android but we’re iterating quickly now. We also have some very exciting Android features coming soon.

This release does have one major notable item worth talking about here (we detailed more of the specifics in the Change Log). With 1.3 and iPhone/iPad, we now are generating full source as part of the XCode project created at project setup. This change provides several benefits in terms of ensuring that we’re in continued compliance with Apple’s Terms of Service, making it easier for debugging or environmental issues we sometimes run into and making it easier to export a project to another machine (useful for agency/development partners).

The updated the Kitchen Sink distribution for 1.3 and it can be downloaded either from github or in a zip distribution. For 1.3, we’ve also started a basic Kitchen Sink for iPad.

What’s next?

As soon as we finish one release, we’ve already begun the next – in some cases before the final release is out the door. The next release is expected to be 1.4 and should be released to the community in June. For 1.4, we’ll continue to focus primarily on maintenance issues, API parity for Android and full API support for the upcoming iPhone 4.0 OS.

We’ll be pushing the first drop for the Blackberry SDK very soon now that 1.3 is out the door. Blackberry work has been progressing in parallel and we hope to release it within the next couple of weeks to Professional/Enterprise subscribers and Partners. We anticipate the full community release of Blackberry will be late Summer. If you’re not currently a subscription customer and would like to get access to Blackberry, please signup here.

Developer Site Updates

We’re making a number of major improvements to the Developer website and hope to release them in waves over the next month. Besides a number of nagging issues/bugs that have been reported, we’re also improving site search, introducing a new forum-based discussions and rolling out a new help desk for subscription customers.

Desktop Plans

Many have asked why Mobile releases faster than Desktop. This is a good question and let me address it. Desktop has been a slightly more mature product and has been adopted by some rather very large companies (as long as a ton of projects from tiny to large). We’re continuing to make substantial investments in Desktop and will be having a big update in the summer for Desktop.

Module SDK

Quite a number of developers have used the current iPhone Module SDK to extend Titanium. In 1.4, we’re planning on introducing the new Android Module SDK. We’re also hard at work on a new product we’re calling Marketplace that relates to modules for mobile, tablet and desktop. If you’re interested in extending Titanium with your own unique stuff, please let us know.

Tooling

We have some new significant updates to the Titanium tooling in the works – including debugger support. Expect a refresh of the current tooling with massive improvements in the early Summer timeframe.

Improved Documentation

We continue with each release to improve the API reference documentation. However, we know we’ve got a long way to go to better documentation. We’ve been working with a professional training company to produce our first set of programming guides and I’m pleased to say that we’ve almost finished the first new Getting Started Guide. The guide will be much more comprehensive and will be the first of many new Guides we’ll be producing over the next few months.

Training

We’re very close to launching a new comprehensive, professionally produced AppU video training series. Our plan is to release new video content every month much like we do software. The training will include not only on-demand video based courseware, but also guides and sample code. Stay tuned for more updates.

Community Growth

The last 4 months have been a whirlwind for the Appcelerator team and we’re very proud of our accomplishments and all of the great applications that are being built from all over the world. Nothing makes us more happy than to hear about all the cool applications that you’re building every day. Thank you for sharing them with us.

With all of this growth, comes challenges that we’re trying to meet. In the past 4 weeks, we’ve had numerous website outages as we hurried to upgrade our Amazon AWS infrastructure to handle the growth. We think we’re now ready for the next wave of growth from a infrastructure standpoint. We’ve also found more places where we could add high-availability and load-balancing as well as invested in better monitoring tools.

We’ve also welcomed four new developers to the Appcelerator team in the past 2 weeks – all of which came directly from our community and who are passionate about what we’re trying to accomplish. With this we hope to be able to continue to accelerate development and make Titanium the best product available.

Thank you so much for your support, your passion and your patience as we continue on our journey together.

Glad to see some emphasis on Android – but there’s a long way to go to bring it just to parity with Apple development. It’ll be great when the day arrives that the kitchenSink doesn’t have to hide/exclude functionality on Android and the Ti mobile SDK is truly cross-platform.

Keep up the great work!

JiPi

Posted May 14, 2010 @ 4:35 am

Agrees with Clem (Clem from Linux Mint ? Anyway…) about your reactivity concerning Apple ToS ! I know you were already complying with it, but I think giving us full source will assure your clients a future if something ever happens to Titanium/Appcelerator (which we hope will never happen !). Developing without having control and without knowing if you’ll have to start all over could be a hard decision, that way, you’ll get even more developers !

In short, it’s simplifies choice of mobile dev tools ! Go with Titanium, if it turns bad, you can always continue with generated code !

Thanks and keep up the work !

Electrum

Posted May 14, 2010 @ 10:00 am

ei, whats going on. My Titanium app alert me about a new 1.3 version update. So i clicked yes… and the download started and finished, but still says “Titanium 1.2.1 . Also I redownloaded from the site.. still 1.2.1 whats wrong ?

This is awesome news – except I can not figure out where to actually download 1.3 – I tried grabbing the latest from the “Click here to update” but its failing, and the current download from the site is 1.2.1 – can we get a link?

the current version of Ti Dev to download is still 1.2.1
the Mobile SDK got updated to 1.3
to view and use that , you need to have your project imported into TI Dev, then go to the ‘edit’ section and from the ‘Titanium SDK’ drop down, chose 1.3.0